Jobs returning to the Lehigh Valley, slowly

Lehigh Valley workers were hit harder by the recession and recovered more slowly from the damage than those in many comparable urban areas.

That finding and a slew of others are included in the fifth annual State of the Lehigh Valley research study that was rolled out Thursday at Lehigh University by the Lehigh Valley Research Consortium and Renew Lehigh Valley.

Researchers Christopher Ruebeck and Jamila Bookwala, who led the presentation, ran down regional employment figures between 2006 and 2012, finding that the Lehigh Valley's job market held its own prior to the recession, comparing favorably with similar metro areas, with the nation as a whole and with our neighbors in New Jersey.

But the Valley's unemployment rate rose more than comparable metro areas during the Great Recession, and those jobs have come back more slowly than in many comparable areas or the state or nation as a whole.

"The Lehigh Valley is taking some time to recover," Ruebeck said.

Not surprisingly, two traditional areas of strength shed jobs: manufacturing and distribution.

"Production and transportation took big hits in the recession, they have still been trending down, but not as quickly," Ruebeck said.

More troubling, job growth in education and two key health care job categories, which are especially critical to the Lehigh Valley economy, have not been strong even in the recovery.

"We see a sobering trend. Our metropolitan area's recovery in all three of these important sectors, as measured by job growth, has been below the average of our metropolitan areas," Ruebeck and co-author Sabrina Terrizzi wrote.

That hasn't done wonders for Lehigh Valley incomes, which while still above the national average, continue to decline, according to the report.

"We do see a downward trend; what we do need to focus on is to find ways to stem that downward trend," Bookwala said.

Several audience members highlighted the need to better align the skills of those looking for work with the available jobs.

Concannon-Miller CEO Robert A. Oster recalled attending a recent manufacturers' round table in which several company executives said they had multiple open positions they simply couldn't fill.

"The biggest challenge they indicated they had was a lack of a skilled labor force to fill the positions they have available," Oster said. "And yet our unemployment rate is still where it is. There is a great disconnect."

Providing some hope, a strong majority of high school students surveyed plan to go on to higher education, a predictor of future incomes. But affordability of that higher education remains a concern.

"For both women and men, the vast majority, about three-quarters of them, say they want to go on to college," Bookwala said.

There was also a glimmer of hope in the cleanliness of the environment. Both counties are producing less waste per capital. And research showed fewer unhealthy air quality days in recent years, Bookwala said.

Still, the Valley is experiencing some particularly unhealthy periods when the data are looked at on a hourly basis.

"At certain times of the day, certain days of the month, we see some pretty alarming spikes in air pollution," Bookwala said.

Deana Zosky, co-chair of Renew Lehigh Valley, challenged participants, which included an array of government, business and nonprofit leaders, to follow an Iroquois principle in using the findings: to make decisions based on how they affect the next seven generations.

"To me, that is pretty impressive. It is easy to do short-term, it is really hard to do long-term," Zosky said.